NASA Denies Drone Hack, Data Leak

NASA has denied that one of its drones was hacked and that sensitive information was stolen from its systems.

A hacker group that allegedly has members in several countries claims to have breached NASA’s networks. The hackers published the contact details of NASA employees, server configurations, videos, and information on some of the space agency’s missions.

The hackers also claimed to have uploaded a flightpath to a Global Hawk aircraft in an effort to get it to crash into the Pacific Ocean, but their plan allegedly failed.

However, NASA has denied the hackers’ claims, stating that the information posted online by the group is publicly available. SecurityWeek can confirm that much of the information, including the names, email addresses and phone numbers of NASA employees, are available to the public on NASA’s website.

“Control of our global hawk aircraft was not compromised. NASA has no evidence to indicate the alleged hacked data are anything other than already publicly available data. NASA takes cybersecurity very seriously and will continue to fully investigate all of these allegations,” NASA told SecurityWeek.

“NASA strives to make our scientific data publically available, including large data sets, which seems to be how the information in question was retrieved. Our Open Data websites offer easier access and use of NASA data through tools and shared experiences using more than 30,000 datasets: Open.NASA.gov, Data.NASA.gov, API.NASA.gov, Code.NASA.gov, GitHub.com/NASA,” the agency added.

NASA was targeted by many hackers in the past and some have successfully breached the agency’s systems, which led to them being prosecuted by US authorities. However, there have also been many cases where individuals and groups made false claims to attract attention.

Eduard Kovacs is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.